Why English is Not a Programming Language
Posted by Ben Jackson Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:30:00 GMT
Gruber has a great analysis on why Applescript fails miserably as a programming language. He makes a good point on the break between the inherent ambiguity of human speech and the rigid constraints of machine language:
But saying what you mean, in English, almost never “just works� and compiles successfully as AppleScript, and so to be productive you still have to understand all of the ways that AppleScript actually works. But this is difficult, because the language syntax is optimized for English-likeness, rather than being optimized for making it clear just what the fuck is actually going on.
While I feel like programming has outgrown trivial conventions like braces and semicolons, Apple is not going to teach your grandma how to program by "talking to the computer". I'd much rather see an extensible scripting interface to Apple events that could be implemented by any language community that had enough interest.
